SME and OL tonearms....

Just make sure all adjustments are available on your new arm.  Some arms are limited

SME have a knife-edge bearings, it is not good for many cartridges.
Look for Reed tonearms or Kuzma if you’re looking for something really great and new.
Reed 3p is my favorite modern tonearm (available in 9 inch, 10.5 or 12 inch) 

I can highly recommend moving on up the Origin Live line. Their Conqueror has served me well for over 10 years now. If I were ever to upgrade it would be to another Origin Live, without hesitation. No idea how they compare to SME, mine was an upgrade from a Graham 2.0, an arm which in spite of being very highly respected is nowhere near being in the same realm as my Conqueror. In the more than 10 years of using mine I've massively upgraded the cartridge, phono stage, interconnect, and turntable, never yet felt any need to upgrade that arm though. They've improved a lot, now with better wire, arm tube, etc. Probably priced out of your range, even used. But whatever. You get the idea. Just get the best OL you can afford, relax, and enjoy.

Dear @teleos : I like OL but I like SME too and the SME models you listed  has removable headshell that's an advantage to interchange in easy way diferent cartridges.

Btw, no one of those SME has knife bearings but ball races.

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.

Having lived with and compared a few tone arms certain things stand out. Bearing in mind its always possible to make something be the best even in spite of inherently less than perfect design (see: 911) still inherently superior design helps a lot.

Viewed this way, design elements that steer me away from SME and towards Origin Live-
Removable head shell. Terrible idea. Unless you have a lot of cartridges. Even then the design forces you to sacrifice rigidity for convenience.

Extra connections. Every connection adds distortions to the music signal. The fewer the better. This is a big deal.

Hard wired vs interconnect. Might seem a good idea, being able to upgrade the interconnect. In reality this adds cost and is almost impossible to buy a good enough interconnect to make up for all the extra connections. (I had Ted Denney make me a custom phono lead. For this reason alone I thought it unlikely the Conqueror with its OL lead would be much better than my Graham with Ted’s custom Synergisitic interconnect. Wrong. Wasn’t even close.)

Anti-skate with spring. Dangling weight on thread might seem low-tech. Until you realize it relies on gravity, which hasn’t changed in like 15 billion years. Compared to the spring. Which can break in... well a lot sooner. And stretch and change its tension long before that.

Take the money you would spend on a good interconnect, put it into the arm, get an even better OL arm. No contest.

Extra connections. Let us count them all. OL, cartridge pin at one end, solder and RCA at the other. Grand total: 3.
SME: cartridge pin, headshell solder, headshell contacts, arm contacts, arm solder, RCA solder, RCA, interconnect, interconnect solder, interconnect solder, RCA. Grand total: 11.

No contest. Not even close. Music not distortions.

$2K?  Get a good used SME V arm. 

Thanks to all. This is truly a wonderful forum! 

I would highly recommend you to look for good used Reed 3P tonearm, because no other tonearm will give you full adjustment of your cartridge (not only VTA on the fly, but an Azimuth on the fly). Unique modern design and superb quality from Europe. Single wire from the cartridge pin to your phono stage. The new one is very expensive, but used '9 or '10.5 sample is something you can find for $2k probably.